Shawabty of Queen Madiken

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This is a shawabty of Queen Madiken. The female figure wears the queen's vulture headdress over the tripartite wig. The arms are not crossed, the hands are opposed. This figure has no implements and no seed bag. There are six visible horizontal lines of incised text encircling the body. The text...

This is a shawabty of Queen Madiken. The female figure wears the queen's vulture headdress over the tripartite wig. The arms are not crossed, the hands are opposed. This figure has no implements and no seed bag. There are six visible horizontal lines of incised text encircling the body. The text is framed and there is a blank column up the center of the back dividing the back of the text. The text is painted black. This mummiform shape does not have a back pillar or base. The feet are missing. The face is very worn. The tops of the hands and the right side of the elbow are worn.
The ancient Nubians included shawabtys in their tombs only in the Napatan Period, about 750–270 B.C. These funerary figurines are based on Egyptian shawabtys, but differ from them in many features of their iconography. For instance, the known Nubian examples are only from royal tombs. Also, they have unique texts, implements, poses and are known to have the largest number of shawabtys included in one tomb. Their function, it is assumed, was the same as that of the Egyptian shawabty, namely to magically animate in the Afterlife in order to act as a proxy for the deceased when called upon to tend to field labor or other tasks. This expressed purpose was sometimes written on the shawabty itself in the form of a "Shawabty Spell," of which versions of various lengths are known. Shorter shawabty inscriptions could also just identify the deceased by name and, when applicable, title(s). However, many shawabtys carry no text at all. The ideal number of such figurines to include in a tomb or burial seems to have varied during different time periods.

Provenance

From Nubia (Sudan), Nuri, Pyramid 27 (tomb of Queen Maldiken). 1918: excavated by the Harvard University–Boston Museum of Fine Arts Expedition; assigned to the MFA in the division of finds by the government of the Sudan.